Walking You Through OSIDays 2010

Sep 22nd, 2010

Day 1 :Building Powerful Search in Drupal by Prajwals Manchikatla : Ya I do have loved to see what the session was. But rather than that I was interested in the talk by Bastian Feder’s The most unknown parts of PHPunit . He walked through different code examples . He also made it clear for me how @depend works etc. Thanks for his time spending with me. Citizen Journalism on Drupal by Markus Franz : He was telling how Drupal helped them for making Citizen Journalism. A case study . I am a little hard coded techie who loves to see some demos and codes. So it was a disappointing one for me. I didn’t attended the Ingres 10 new features. Dave Hall was coming with the session How to run hundreds of Drupal Sites. Though I have played with Aeigr, through twitter I have promised him that I will be there on his talk. It was an awesome session and I hope everyone has loved it. I feel many of the druplers in the room haven’t tried aegir yet. I missed the talk of Jakub Vrana about the Adminer Editor – creating administration interface for free in PHP for both the sessions were on the same time. Food and networking . We can see a lots of young entreprenurs. I remembered the wordings of Praseed Pai :) . I feel he is always right. After noon session was with Fabien Potencier to know more about the Symfony2. The mic was so poor that sometimes the voice wasn’t audible. Also in his slides the blue color( I think it was blue itself ) was not visible for me( not sure about others ). So I missed the session RDF in Drupal7 and what it means for the web at large by Gaurav Kumar. But I managed to get into it after Fabiens session and got something about RDF. I missed Building & Scaling facebook with opensource by David Recordon for I was with the session Typical architecture to scale large Drupal implementations by Denis Lafont Trevisan. Introduction to Kaltura by Jason Levitt . He was very much worried for there was no internet connection and his laptop was not plugging properly to show the slides. Some of them went to watch the session by Markus Franz Quality Assurance in PHP projects. This would have really helped project managers. I was also there for awhile. The awesome session that I was able to hear was by Marek Sotak who build the root candy admin theme. He moved us through What’s new in Drupal 7 theming. People who don’t know Drupal 6 , may not be having any problem for they are looking D7 for the first time . But it was an interesting session for those who knows Drupal 6 and also to those who want to learn D7. I missed the session by Jonathan Gray about the NoSQL overview. I hope he may have told something about MongoDB and all. Anway I want to look into his slides to know what he has covered. Day 2 : Event started little late around 9:20 . I will not blame Janakiraman for he was there on time . Not sure why he made a delay to start . He talks about the Windows Azure and how we can use it for PHP. Azure uses IIS . So hopefully we don’t want to look more into Windows Azure, for many of our PHP frameworks relay on apache mod rewrite functionalities , image magick than PHP GD library. So good bye azure :) , I will live in Ubuntu cloud if I need rather than in a properitery cloud like Azure :). And the last demo failed, though he promised he will show it before he leave. But I know him and his knowledge in the cloud, so wishing him a good success. Also got a chance to chit chat with him. Jonathan Gray introduced Handoop , HBase and Hive in Facebook. He also talks about the open-source plans about this in facebook . Jakub Vrana the co-author of php manuals, a good teacher, the man behind adminer an alternative for phpmyadmin or we can say an admin interface for free, came with the session about notorm. I was hearing about NOTORM efficiently get relational data in PHP, for the first time, but from his examples I can understand it was something similar to the Zend_Db_Table . I enjoyed his demos and session. Bastian Feder came up with the session Writing beautiful documentation with php Documentator . It was also a good one when we work with Eclipse , Netbeans or something like that and also for the persons who is trying to use it. ie when we build some API. Doctrine uses phpdocumentator. Food and networking …… ;) The next session was by Kevin Schroeder an Evangelist for Zend. I was accompaniying with him. Talking about his laptop sticker he remebered the stickers and some of the badges he have brought. Also the troubles he faced at customs for the clearence of the pin in his bag. I loved watching Using Zend Server to run your PHP Applications. He showed some demos . I used to watch webinars by Zend. So I was aware how powerful he was. He introduced the community server and some of the beneficts over it. He gave away the Zend Studio licence for a simple question. I was already having one I got from Zend ;). The stickers and badges disappeared within a few seconds when he says about it. Gaurav Mishra came up with the session Harnessing CSS3 for a Beautiful Web. But some times he missed the clear points that need to be told like IE upto 8 was not in the consortium of w3c, and only came now. Many of them were bothered about how we can use CSS3 without bringing the same in IE6. I don’t know why they were still bothered about IE6 , which has born in 1998 and still holding in 2010. Its like not using a motor vehicle instead rickshaw( People who lives in BC ).The opera evangalist Shwetank Dixit was present . He was an awesome guy who can really make the event a beutiful one. I have loved if those guys have given him a 10 minutes to speak about HTML5 and CSS3 . He talks to our BCK guys there and also promised a full day session of HTML5 and CSS3 soon. PHP 5.3 a walk through by David Coallier was another awesome one. He was an active person and many of the slides and how he presented was awesome. I don’t think if the guy was in love with PHP , would have never told him that we are in short of time. I don’t know whether we will get such a session any more. Many of them were unhappy in the decision as PHP an open-source and than promoting an open-source talk, they gave more time for Microsoft Azure. Sorry David, but I no, we missed it :(. Prajwals Manchikatla came up with another session on Core Concepts of worlds most misunderstood language Javascript . It was interesting with some of the examples of classes , objects and all. I loved it . Subversion 1.7 and the future features by Senthil Kumaran S. Senthil was working as the core developer of Subversion , so he was really a nice person to talk about sub-version and its features. I know why he came up with the talk earlier than 1.7 has been realeased :) ( Git ;) ) . He talks about the changes in the library and how it will not effect when its upgraded. He also confirmed that subversion is having many clients from properiery world and so there is no way at present to move as a distributed one, for all will be having the same copy. He also says that when git works for open-source projects , svn works for properietery company who don’t love to take the whole bunch of code to their home. He talks about the licencing changes. It was an awesome session to know how subversion works and to hear some history behind it. Some of them shared their doubts. Day 3 : I was with the session on Postgre 9.0 features by Ashutosh Bapat and the next talk by Chetan Suttarway about the Postgre SQL security threats and solutions. They were from the Postgre company Enterprise DB and presented it nicely. I missed the talks on HTML5 state of Art by Jason Levitt, but I think I will not for Shwetank Dixit will be coming with 1 day session on CSS3 and HTML5 in the coming months. The other session was Cloud Hosting Uncovered by Markus Franz. Emerging Technologies for Analytics for large Data Volumes was presented by Roger Burkhardt. This session disappointed me for I thought he will be going with which DB is good for large volume and which DB is good for small volumes , search and many of the things. He was mainly talking about the Ingres Vector solution which still has not released as opensource. I went to know about the drivers so I can connect with PHP. Like pear installation and so on . But I was unsatisfied with the answer I got from the Indian guy. Don’t know who he is. He told me to download the whole bunch of thing which I don’t want , which my laptop is already with LAMP. I just want to download DB and the driver. So what I feel was it was not an open-source product. So I just walked away from there and I am satisfied with MySQL , Postgre, Maria, MongoDB and so on . MySQL performace tuning , top 10 tips by Sonali Minocha : Yes she took us through some examples , how to use and where not to use EXPLAIN and such stuffs. Where to use CHAR and VARCHAR . Some of the differences and beneficts over MyISAM and InnoDB . Thanks for her tips and tricks. Food and Networking Other sessions after the food were Large Scale Linux Deployments-Automated Solutions by Murthy Raju and Developing and deploying top PHP applicatios on Windows with Webmatrix and WebAPI . I skipped both . Pictures : I do have uploaded some of the pics taken by Arun to http://picasaweb.google.com/kthari85/OSIDays2010 . If you need a higher resolution of the pics shout at me . I am ready to send those . Feed Back : Feedback for an event is always good I think . Don’t feel bad against me. I don’t want to harm anyone , but to make it better I feel its always good. 0 ) Good to show the people who have proposed the proposals. As its an open-source event bring community rather than taking a few from the panels or something like that . 1 ) Internet connection and power plugs : I cannot live without internet . Its like oxygen for developers . I was so sad to see such a largest conference with out internet and power points on the desk . When we guys do Barcamps in Kerala, we do have internet connectivity. And I don’t know how the guys from international level thinks about such an event :( . For the next time do have good internet connectivity and power plugs . 2 ) First day : Sunday was filled with good sessions and tight schedule . It was really a nice thing if some of the sessions were moved to third day ( We can see third was not having any :( ) . ( Seems they tried to bring many people on sunday itself and didn’t even thought about the people who loved to hear ) 3 ) There are two halls, and the two was some distance apart . The sessions on the two halls doesn’t end on the same time . If we managing something like to cutshort the time , its good to do for every session. Rules are same for everyone :) . 4 ) Give some extra time in the chart for each session. ie around 10 minutes or so. So for a 45 minute session will bring 55 minutes , and this will not make to cutshort the time he speaks. He can take advantage of the extra time. Setting up the system and the whole bunch of stuffs. Thanks once again for all guys at OSI Days. Hope you will take some of my suggestions . But I missed J Wage :( and love to bring you one day. Lets see whether it works ;) . I was having a gold pass and have covered the topics as the same . There were other sessions also which I have not described anything.